Paradigm: the Shift

Worldview. It’s how I see, read, and understand my world. It’s the lenses I look through, and like most people, I don’t realize I’m wearing them. (Have you ever looked for your glasses, only to find them resting on your face where they belong?)

I have taught online classes for home educated high school students, and one of those classes has been a worldview course. It’s one of my favorites, not because I have the privilege of watching students come into their own a bit but because they learn there always exists something they don’t know yet.

Right now I’m pleasantly surprised to find that I don’t know everything there is to know. Again. That’s not new information, and I’m not so arrogant that I ever thought I knew everything—well, except for the teenage “disease” that seems to be an epidemic in that stage. It’s not that I was comfortable with everything I knew as much as I stopped thinking about it. I wasn’t examining my thoughts or their processes as often. I settled in my ways and the ways I thought about things. The people closest to me thought fairly similarly. I maintained a wider spectrum of social media friends to “stay in touch with the culture and reality.” I was happy with all of that.

Have you ever had someone ask a question that shook your paradigm (and maybe your worldview, too)? Maybe you remember the question well. My experience hasn’t been that exactly. No one question has ever rattled me.

In my experience it has been a slow exploration, and the questions come up in my own inner dialogue. While that can feel unsettling, it’s the most pleasant for me. I prefer to wrestle with my thoughts in private sometimes. (Have I mentioned I’m an introverted processor?) I’m still waiting for the idea “pieces” to fit together nicely, so it’s a messy process. I just enjoy the whole thing, though. After the initial surprise or shock of it, the thinking and the settling (even if it’s temporary) is fun for me.

Have you had this kind of shakeup happen in your worldview or paradigm? What was that like for you? How do you feel about the process?